Welcome to Monday: mites on your face and the microbiome that won’t let us stick to our diet

I somehow like this news. Now we all can say we’re equally scared of having those damn mites on our faces. Every single one of us has 0.3-0.4 mm mites on our faces. Mites as in small arachnids. Those are so small that we can’t even see them with out naked eyes. They feast on bacteria that is on our skin and on dead skin cells. You can call them cleaner mites.

I like the idea more or less that we, our bodies, are fine tuned to the life on Earth, in symbiosis with many other animals. We’re hosts to viruses, bacteria, mites and parasites that may or may not harm us. Most often than not our bodies evolved to live and work together with these microorganisms and reap the benefits off these relations.

In a sense, having gut bacteria or microbiome that simply eats up the vegetables we ingest and then gives us its poop full or sugars, minerals and vitamins, should have been a sign that we would also have such critters on our body too. It was a well known fact that bacteria lurk on our faces, but we didn’t knew about mites, which are way bigger than bacteria.

In any case, we welcome the face critters, those cleaning mites, those guys to live on out outsides. Welcome and have a happy stay.

Getting back to microbiome, did you know that in the same house people share the same microbiome with the other inhabitants and also with the pets? And, another interesting surprise: the microbiome from our gut might not let us stick to a given diet. There is a hypothesis that the microbiome can generate certain stimuli in our gut to make us crave certain kinds of foods, even sugars, so that we would not be able to stick with out diet. We are more entangled with our world than we’ve thought, eh?